jlojko

I'll take it.

I ride soft a lot of the time and I am basically looking to get the stiffest ride possible. I have a few pieces of advice based on my experience. the first is your high backs. There are few manufacturers, including Burton and TechNine, that have high backs with wings. The wings that riders are using nowadays are for the park and they actually put them on the outside of each leg. This setup is for doing park tricks and putting pressure onto the nose or tail of the board. But you can reverse these wings to the inside of your high backs. Having wings on the inside of your high back is going to give you a lot more control and ride that is more responsive. The next thing I have learned is that you can stiffen soft boots up dramatically by putting pvc in between the shell and the liner. A lot of higher-end boots have softer and stiffer tongue choices. But if you can slap some additional plastic in there, it gets even stiffer. I find that plastic 5-gallon bucket provides just the right stiffness. But you have to play around with shapes and cuts to get it to fit and work the way you want. Duct tape holds it to the inside of the liner just fine. I used to get a bend in the back of my boot that would dig into the back of my ankle. An oval piece of plastic running up the back of the boot between the liner and the shell and the problem was fixed. I can also recommend Burton Driver X boots with no mods. Those things are pretty good for stiffness, comfortable as anything and light as a feather. I have also found that they hold up very well. And for bindings, I have found that base plates made of metal are stiffer than plastic. Weird, huh? There are still a few manufacturers using aluminum bases and I like them. I would seriously consider making franken bindings; that is using base plates from one manufacturer, straps from another and high backs from a third. You can find parts/pieces on ebay for cheap. I ride angles very similar to yours when riding soft. I don't sit as far back as you because I like to get in the woods a lot, and it sounds like you might be on the front side of the mountain a little more. For a board, I was riding Custom X wide for a long time. The boards kept getting shorter and eventually, I was downsized from a 168 to a 164. That was a problem since I always felt like I wanted a couple more cms. I know the Custom X is nowhere near as stiff as a Vapor or even the T6. But here's another thing: every year, I broke the board in half. I'm not kidding. For like 5 years in a row, the damn thing just snapped while riding under relatively normal conditions. I do ride bumps a lot and I'm 200+ lbs. But every year, I would call Burton in the off-season and they would send me the brand new next year's version. So even though I was disappointed with the performance, how can you pass up a new ride very year? I have to say that I am still wowed by Burton's customer service in this regard. But in the end (last summer), I said enough. I moved to a the Arbor A-Frame. The shape is a little more progressive in the side cut and it took me at least a few full days to adjust my riding to the new shape. But I got the extra length I wanted and I really love this board. it is a little stiffer than the Custom X, but probably still not as stiff as your T6 (wood vs. aluminum). I also have not had a good season out East so I have not been able to really beat the bag out of this thing in the woods. So the test results are still not in on durability. So you know what Burton did when I said I don't want another Custom X? I put my wife on the phone and they set her up with a new ride to use the warranty.

I'm trying to figure out why more hard booters don't enter or do well in banked slalom events. I have read this thread and a few others with references to "banked slalom" only to find the general opinion that the banking of the course gets the soft setups back in the race game. I get that. But that isn't saying that it gives softies an advantage, is it? I have no experience on a banked course, but I'm going to try it in a few weeks. I ride some nastar gates on a hard plate about 20% of the time. And I ride a big soft setup all mountain most of the time. I'm thinking that I will try one run on each setup in the banked slalom event. I have watched a bunch of videos of banked slalom racing and all of the footage is of softies and they all appear to be sliding around the bank turns. I just don't get why a carving setup won't do better in that situation. Even when you are turning around a banked turn, can't you set the edge and be more efficient on a racing deck? I'd love to hear experience or educated opinions on this topic. Thanks for any responses.

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